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Now that Henry Waxman is retiring from Congress, it is clearly Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL).
State Action Alert!

Sen. Durbin has long demonstrated a bias against dietary supplements. Here’s a taste of his career-long attempt to give FDA the power to sweep thousands of supplements off the shelves:

• In 2004, Sen. Durbin proposed an amendment to a defense funding bill. This has been a frequent tactic of his, using must-pass legislation to push his agenda in the form of unrelated amendments so that anti-supplement proposals can slip into law unnoticed and without debate. This amendment restricted access to nutritional supplements on military bases and created reporting requirements that were stricter than for over-the-counter drugs. Eventually Durbin agreed with supplement defender Sen. Hatch (R-UT) to drop his amendment. In return he agreed to legislation creating an Adverse Event Reporting (AER) System for supplements. The bill passed in 2006. 

• As a follow up to the 2006 bill, in 2009 Sen. Durbin along with Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI), John Dingell (D-CO), and Henry Waxman (D-CA) asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate supplement adverse event reports (AERs). This resulted in a report published that same year: “GAO Report to Congressional Requesters: Dietary Supplements FDA Should Take Further Actions to Improve Oversight and Consumer Understanding.” The most notable finding was that the FDA had seen a threefold increase in dietary supplement AERs compared to the previous year. There’s a good reason for that: the legislation requiring AERs of dietary supplements did not go into effect until 2008. Of course the number of reports will be higher after reports become mandatory! 

• Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, in 2011 Sen. Durbin used a troubling but isolated incident-the sale of melatonin-filled brownies called “Lazy Cakes”-to ask the FDA to clarify its authority to regulate foods that contain additives, such as the hormone melatonin, and to clarify the difference between conventional food and dietary supplements. This request simply ignored the fact that clear regulations already existed on both these issues. Since Lazy Cakes were not dietary supplements, the FDA would regulate them as food. Ingredients that are intentionally added to food-in this case, melatonin-are food additives. Food additives require pre-market approval from the FDA based on data demonstrating safety in a food additive petition. Lazy Cakes did not submit a petition to the FDA as they should have, so were already subject to FDA enforcement under existing law. Sen. Durbin at the time seemed to us to be trying his best to confuse this issue in order to paint supplements as being unregulated, which is simply untrue. This was always nothing more than a matter of enforcement, not authority.